Posts Tagged / Piano

Thanks so much to all of our students and their wonderful families for making our 2018 Winter recital our biggest and bestest yet! We look forward to even more performances during our Spring recital on June 16th.

Camas Award Program Honors the Achievement

CAMAS March 15, 2017 — Perfect Harmony has been selected for the 2017 Best of Camas Award in the Musical Instruments & Teachers category by the Camas Award Program.

Each year, the Camas Award Program identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and our community. These exceptional companies help make the Camas area a great place to live, work and play.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2017 Camas Award Program focuses on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the Camas Award Program and data provided by third parties.

About Camas Award Program

The Camas Award Program is an annual awards program honoring the achievements and accomplishments of local businesses throughout the Camas area. Recognition is given to those companies that have shown the ability to use their best practices and implemented programs to generate competitive advantages and long-term value.

The Camas Award Program was established to recognize the best of local businesses in our community. Our organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations and other business advertising and marketing groups. Our mission is to recognize the small business community’s contributions to the U.S. economy.

Perfect Harmony believes that music is just as important for young minds as math, science, and language arts. So we offer early lesson times to those students in homeschool programs. A 10% discount is available for any homeschool students registering for private lessons or semi-private lessons which start between the hours of 12pm–3pm on Monday–Thursday.

Consider this: Albert Einstein was a master violinist. His mother, also a talented musician, made sure musical expression was a part of the daily home life of her children growing up. Einstein himself began playing the violin when he was just 6-years-old. By the age of 13, he was playing Mozart’s sonatas.

Einstein is quoted saying, “Life without playing music is inconceivable to me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music… I get most joy in life out of music.” Interestingly, a 1993 study of college students showed that listening to a Mozart sonata improved the student’s performance on spatial reasoning tests. That led to widespread claims that listening to Mozart temporarily increases Intelligence Quotients or IQs.

Yet, newer studies found IQ doesn’t increase

According to Ani Patel, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University and the author of “Music, Language, and the Brain,” listening to music can be relaxing and contemplative, but simply plugging in your iPod isn’t going to suddenly make you more intelligent.

However, Patel says, “there’s now a growing body of work that suggests that actually learning to play a musical instrument does have impacts on other [cognitive] abilities.” These abilities include speech perception, the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, the ability to recognize emotions in people’s voices and the ability to develop language, reading, and other academic skills.

Apparently, playing a musical instrument engages all four hemispheres of the brain at an electrical, architectural and chemical level more than simply listening to music, which explains why it optimizes brain function. This may have been part of what made Einstein such an incredible genius.

Research on the impact of music training on the mind

In one notable study led by Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the School of Communication, music training introduced as late as high school, was found to help sharpen hearing and language skills, and improve teenage brain’s responses to sound. In their study, Krause and his team of researchers followed 40 Chicago-area high school freshmen from when before school started until their senior year. Almost half the students had enrolled in band classes in school, which entailed two to three hours a week of instrumental group music instruction.

The other half of the recruited students had enrolled in junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). ROTC paid more emphasis on fitness exercises during a similar time frame. Both groups, however, attended the same schools in low-income neighborhoods.

After analyzing electrode recordings at the start of the study and three years later, Krause and colleagues found that all the students improved in language skills, but the improvement was greater for students in music classes. Moreover, the music group showed more rapid maturation in the brain’s sensitivity and response to sound compared with the ROTC group.

“Although learning to play music does not teach skills that seem directly relevant to most careers, the results suggest that music may engender what educators refer to as ‘learning to learn’,” wrote Kraus in the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

So, why does music training has such a strong influence on the brain

You might be wondering: Why does music training influence language and other higher brain functions so? Neuropsychologist Patel offers a possible answer in his theory dubbed the OPERA hypothesis:

“The basic idea is that music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there’s overlap, that’s the ‘O’ of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth,” he says. “The ‘P’ in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch is in key or not, and it can be painful if it’s just slightly out of tune.”

The level of precision involved when processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in processing speech. This means, he says, developing our brain’s musical networks may very well enhance our ability to process speech and, thus, improve our language skills.

“And the last three components of OPERA, the ‘E-R-A,’ are emotion, repetition and attention,” he says. “These are factors that are known to promote what’s called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain’s structure as a function of experience.” In other words, experiences that require full attention and engage the brain through emotion and repetition such as playing music effectively change the brain’s structure, making it stronger over time.

The lesson

These emerging music neuroscience studies that really began to take off around 2000 have important implications about the role of music in the lives of young children, Patel says. For one, if you are a parent, understanding there is a link between musical training and improved brain function, enhanced language skills and higher academic achievement in children can provide the motivation you need to enroll your kids into music training early, preferably before the end of their teenage years.

Even as an adult, practicing a musical instrument regularly can bring tremendous benefits. As another neuropsychologist, Nadine Gaab, at Boston Children’s Hospital notes, “There are a lot of different brain systems involved in successfully playing even a small musical piece: your auditory system, your motor system, your emotional system, your executive function system; this playing together of these brain regions, almost like in a musical ensemble.” They can make your brain stronger.

My kids have been taking piano lessons from Chris for two years now and they truly enjoy it. He keeps the atmosphere positive and builds a rapport with his students. Chris has a kind an easy-going personality which my kids greatly appreciate! He is extremely knowledgeable and has a solid musical background. I am quite impressed by how much my kids have learned and how well they are playing in such a relatively short period of time. My Family and I feel so lucky to have found Perfect Harmony!

Chris is great with my kiddo and does a fantastic job meeting her where she's at with her musical abilities. If she isn't understanding something, he works to find a different way that she can understand. He's well versed in so many musical genres and is incredibly easy to work with. Thanks Chris for developing a love of music in our kid.

Chris has been so helpful working with my 13 year old songwriter-singer daughter! She leaves lessons focused and inspires and really enjoys working with Chris! Chris’ knowledge and experience is fantastic as well!

We love the positive instruction and fun that Chris gives our daughter! She has learned so much on the piano in a short period of time thanks to his ability to teach the fundamentals while making it a happy and emgaging place to be! Our daughter looks forward to coming every week!

What can we say?!?!? Our family has loved "Teacher Chris" for years! His enthusiasm and caring nature have helped our little ukulele player grow and shine. [He even willingly took on my husband for guitar lessons!]

Chris is a fantastic music teacher. As an adult student, I didn't know what to expect, but was very happy with my lessons and when my daughter is ready I wouldn't hesitate to send her to him. He has a passion for what he does and is very talented and able to really pace the lessons to the student's skill level and ability.

We were fortunate that Perfect Harmony had an opening for my pianist daughter. Chris's approach is to build a firm foundation in basic music theory, which I really appreciate. My daughter will never be lost on a piece of music as she learns these great skills.
The music studio is quiet and comfortable and there's a soft couch for parents in the same room. Chris is easygoing, patient, and a good communicator to both student and parent.
We really feel we're into something good and I look forward to my daughter's music confidence increasing.

Chris is the piano teacher for both of my girls at beginner level. Girls feel him friendly and comfortable to be with. I hope my girls enjoy learning music, and Chris does the job. Girls take their pace practicing, and improving. They feel music is fun! I would recommend Chris to other beginner piano learners.